Cheeseburger and Change of History.

 

The case citation 364 US 454 (1960) of the U.S. Supreme Court has become highly significant and historic as the decision in that case filed by a 21 year old negro law student of Howard University, Washington D.C. against the Commonwealth of Virginia has changed the course of history of racial segregation in the country.

The petitioner, belonged to Selma, Alabama State and planned to return home from Washington D.C. He bought a Trailways bus ticket from there to Montgomery, Alabama. He boarded a bus on a fateful day in Oct 1958 at 8 p.m. and the bus arrived at Richmond 'Trailways Bus Terminal', Virginia, about 10:40 p.m. As the bus driver announced a forty-minute stopover there, the Petitioner got off the bus and went into the bus terminal to get something to eat. In the station, he found a restaurant in which one part was used to serve white people and one to serve Negroes. Disregarding this division, the petitioner stepped into the ‘clinically clean’ white section (compared to the “very unsanitary” black section) and sat at table. On noticing this ‘trespass’ by a black, a waitress rushed to ask him to move over to the other section where there were 'facilities' to serve coloured people. The Petitioner firmly refused to move and told her that he was an interstate bus passenger. He ordered a cheeseburger and tea. The waitress immediately withdrew not to bring the ordered items but to bring the Assistant Manager there who 'instructed' the petitioner to 'leave the white portion of the restaurant and advised him that he could be served in the ‘coloured portion.' Upon the petitioner's stout refusal to leave, an officer was called and the petitioner was arrested. He was jailed, tried and convicted with a fine of ten dollars in the Police Justice's Court of Richmond on a charge that he 'Unlawfully did remain on the premises of the Bus Terminal Restaurant of Richmond, Inc. after having been forbidden to do so' by the Assistant Manager. The young student was not willing to take it meekly; instead he was determined to fight against the punishment and the (small) fine imposed on him. Thus unfurled a historic legal battle, in 1958, against racial segregation in U.S.A. Here is how, much later in 2018, the then petitioner briefly recalled the incident to the Associated Press (AP):“She (the waitress) left and came back with the manager. The manager poked his finger in my face and said ‘N—-r, move, 'and I knew that I would not move and I refused to, and that was the case.” The majority 7 judge (with 2 dissentions) Supreme Court decision in the case [citation 364 US 454 (1960)] categorically outlawed racial segregation on public transportation, bus stations and other facilities linked to interstate travel in the United States of America. Thurgood Marshall, who represented the young law student in the above cited Supreme Court case, later became the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Had the cheeseburger and tea ordered by the young student then been served in the Richmond bus-station restaurant, perhaps we wouldn’t have had the emergence of the life-time Civil rights champion, Bruce Boynton, who, at the beginning of this week, succumbed after a ‘tremendous life well lived’ to his long-drawn battle with cancer at the age of 83. On the day of his mortal end, he was to have been honored by a courthouse in his native Selma being renamed after him. Boynton was a final-year law student at Howard University at the time of his arrest in 1958 and after the controversy he wasn’t allowed to practice law in Alabama even though he had passed the bar in 1960. Therefore he had to relocate to Tennessee and practice there until the Alabama bar finally admitted him in 1966. On being licensed by Alabama Bar, he became the first and only black County attorney in Alabama. He spent his entire career as a civil rights attorney. His relentless crusade against racial discrimination right from his student days till his end and the ‘Freedom ride of 1960s that he inspired through his legal battle (Boynton v. Virginia) against the Richmond bus station happening will ever be cherished by everyone in the sphere of civil rights in U.S.A. and those involved with human rights all over the world.

After the historic verdict on December 5, 1960 in Boynton V Virginia 1960- the first time since 1946 that the court got divided (7-2) on a matter of racial segregation- several groups of black and even white students, called ‘Freedom Riders’, set out on buses to travel the South and test whether the ruling in the case was being sincerely followed. But to their dismay, the “Freedom Riders” were arrested or attacked in Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina, and a bus was burned. It was appreciable that the then-President John F. Kennedy quickly diffused fire by ordering stricter enforcement of federal anti-discrimination laws and the decision of the Supreme Court.

Bruce Boynton was born on June 19, 1937, in Selma, Alabama, to Amelia and S.W. Boynton. His parents were also prominent members of the civil rights movement and have greatly contributed to the freedoms that many Blacks have today. From his very young age, apart from being intelligent, Boynton was a gentleman always displaying exemplary courage and honesty to speak his mind. Through his legal work, till his end, he was always helpful to people that others refused to help. He served as Alabama’s first Black special prosecutor and boldly prosecuted the Mayor of Beatrice, Alabama for attacking a BIack man.  While practicing in Selma, Boynton was beaten by Wilcox county sheriff and his Chief Deputy. Afterward, he had to have body guards comprising volunteers. Bruce Boynton’s life is a great lesson to every one about how one can make a difference. About the Richmond happening and Boynton’s actions it is often remarked as: “All he wanted was a cheeseburger, and he changed the course of history.”

*

[The text of the judgment of Boynton V Commonwealth of Virginia can be accessed at: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/364/454#]

 

 Punishment of death

Recently embarked on a brief study on death penalty (as part of periodic self- renewal of knowledge sources). Interesting finds are there for any who surfs the abundant variety of references and internet sources.

In ancient Tamil society, 'death punishment' seems rare. There are references to one Chieftain Nannan  ( Natrinai  292, Kurunthogai 73) who inflicted death punishment on a girl who ate a mango of the royal garden that came floating in a river. In Silappathikaram, the Pandiya King awards death punishment, without any enquiry, on Kovalan on the suspision of theft of the anklet of his wife, the queen. 

But in many societies, death penalty has been in vogue from very early times of recorded history. To mention a few,

i)        The Roman law of the Twelve Tables (5^th Century B.C) contains reference to death penalty. Death sentences were carried out by brutal  means such as ‘beheading, boiling in oil, burying alive, burning, crucifixion, disembowelment, drowning, flaying alive, hanging, impalement, stoning, strangling, being thrown to wild animals, and quartering (being torn apart)’.

ii)   The Draco’s Law Code of Athens, (7^th century B.C.) called ‘draconian law’ has made death penalty as the lone punishment for all crimes (hence the use of the term "draconian" to describe particularly harsh penalties). The myth about Draco’s code is that Code was written not in ink but in blood instead.

iii)     The Hittite Code (14^th Century B.C) incorporates death penalty also but only marginally. The most serious offenses typically were punished through enslavement. Crimes of a sexual nature often were punishable by death.

iv)         The Code of Babylonian King Hammurabi (18^th Century B.C) (Full code available at: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp) engraved on stone tablets for all the public to see has, among its 282 rules/codes, prescribed the death penalty for over 20 different offenses.

Perhaps like the Codes of Manu, Hammurabi code provides a peculiar, unequal kind of law based on social status. The code has rules separately for slaves, freed men, and the freeborn people of the city-state of Babylon.

This code has prescribed severe punishments for many of the offences now more lightly dealt with in most countries (E.g.: death by execution for theft, perjury, and such other crimes). The Code has the famous prescription that "If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye."

A look at some of the crimes bringing liability for the death sentence under the Hammurabi Code offers interesting insights into the system of prevalent law then in Babylon.

In our days of carefree thefts of temple statutes, jewels and properties; construction of substandard public and private buildings by money-thirsty contractors; public indulging in baseless levelling of serious accusations against others; increasing illicit and incest affairs in the society, we have to see how the very harsh Hammurabi Code, has tried to address these social evils.

Death for theft

·       If someone stole anything from the temple or the court, he would be put to death.  

·    The buyer of the sold good or receiver of the stolen item from the thief that person would also be put to death. Escape from death was possible if he could prove that he had no knowledge of the item having been stolen.

·       If a man bought an item from a slave or the son of another man, the purchaser would be considered a thief and could be put to death.

·        If a person’s home was burning and someone went into his house to help put the fire out and if that person was caught stealing from that home, the ‘thief’ would be put to death by fire.

Meddling with Slaves

·        Meddling with another person’s slave could get a person killed.

·        Taking another person’s slave outside the city gates would attract a death sentence.

·        Hiding runaway slaves would also incur a death sentence.

Robbery

·        Any form of robbery was punishable by death.

·       If someone were to break into a home to steal and he was caught, the thief would be taken back to that home, killed there, and buried.

Conspirators

·        Any tavern keeper who allowed conspirators in the tavern, and if those conspirators were not caught, the tavern keeper would face the death penalty.

Adultery & Sexual offences

·        Adultery was a serious crime in ancient Babylon. If a wife and some other man were caught in the act of having an affair, both the wife and paramour could be tied up and thrown into the river. (The husband, if he desired, could pardon his wife and save her from drowning.)

·        If a man forced himself on another man’s wife and he is caught in the act, the man would be put to death. (Luckily, the wife would be held blameless in the situation.)

·        If a wife of a man and the husband of another woman were having an affair and plotted to murder their spouses, both the widows would face impalement.

·        If any father has intimate moments with the wives of their sons and if the son’s father was caught red-handed, the father would be bound and cast into the river.

·   If a son indulges in incest (with his own mother), both he and his mother would be burned to death.

Assault

·    If a pregnant woman was hit and the hit woman was a freeborn woman and if she lost her child due to the injury, the man had to pay a fine. If the woman died as a result of the assault, then besides him, his daughter would also be put to death.

House builder

·    If a house builder did not build a home properly, and if the house collapsed killing the owner, the house builder would be put to death.

·      If the house collapsed and the owner’s son was killed, then the son of the house builder would be put to death.

 

Certainly, the Hammurabi Code is ‘barbaric in nature’ than being legal to our senses. But there is justification to give necessary allowance to the relevant time period, level of civilization and the nature of the society in question.

**

A gruesome glimpse of the past.

In these days of practices of and raised voices for human rights, the following information about Sir Walter Raleigh presents a glimpse of the gruesome days of the past.

Sir Walter Raleigh (1554- 1618)

The much used phrase” many- sided personality” would certainly suit most the one- an English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer- Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618)

Raleigh was educated at the Oriel College, Oxford (1572) and at the Middle Temple law college (1575). His outspoken criticism of the English policy implemented in Ireland and also his help to put down a rebellion in Ireland brought him to the attention of Queen Elizabeth. By 1582, he had become the crown’s favorites, rose to occupy many positions, became a M.P. and was made a Governor of Jersey. Raleigh was also made captain of the queen’s guard.

That Sir Walter Raleigh, was a writer, poet, and adventurer is known to many. But, it may not be known to many that he was one of the earliest victims of the successive injustices of the crowns.

It was Queen Elizabeth I who knighted Walter Raleigh in 1585 and the same Queen put him in prison, seven years later, for not informing his marriage to her. Raleigh married one Elizabeth Throckmorton – one of the ladies -in waiting to the queen - and kept this as a secret from the jealous queen for some time. In 1592, the birth of a son betrayed him, and for this ‘heinous crime’ he and his wife were both imprisoned in the Tower of London. Somehow, he was released after some time.

After Queen Elizabeth I’s death, her successor James I (reigned 1603–25), a peace-loving monarch, wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with Raleigh. James I desired to achieve peaceful relations with other countries. Raleigh’s aggressive policies toward Spain was not to the liking of the peace lover King James I. Raleigh’s enemies too worked to bring about his ruin. In 1603, Raleigh and others were accused of plotting to dethrone the king. Raleigh was convicted on the written evidence of Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham. As a last minute reprieve to Raleigh, the death sentence was ultimately reduced to a lifetime of imprisonment in the Tower of London. After twelve years, though Raleigh was released, he was not pardoned.

After release in 1616, Raleigh was sent out on a mission that he had already been on—and failed at. That was, finding the elusive city of El Dorado. Raleigh and his crew didn’t find the mythical city, but what they did find on the way home was the Spanish. Raleigh getting into a fight with the Spanish went directly against the king’s wishes and orders, and it was considered an act of treason for which Raleigh got his second notice of execution. King James invoked the suspended sentence (of 1603) and Raleigh was finally executed in October 1618.

The execution was gruesome. It has been recorded that it took the executioner two blows to remove Raleigh’s head. The detached head was displayed to the crowd that had assembled for the event. Later, it was placed in a red bag, covered with velvet and presented to his wife. The rest of Raleigh’s body was immediately buried in St. Margaret’s Church in Westminster. He was laid to rest in a place of honour in spite of the accusations of treason that eventually led to his death sentence. For reasons that remain unclear, he was buried in an unmarked grave.

Lady Raleigh (Elizabeth Throckmorton, former lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth), truly loved her doomed husband. She did not remarry and kept her embalmed husband’s head with her until the day she died after 29 years of the execution. According to some stories, she kept the head in a glass case in her home, and curiosity seekers and family friends would travel miles to visit and pay their respects to the head. After her passing away, the head of Raleigh passed on to their son, Carew. He also continued the tradition of keeping the embalmed head, and when he passed away, the head was also buried with him in Surrey.

Though executed for treason, the popular feeling had remained on Raleigh’s side ever since 1603. After his execution, his occasional writings were collected and published. Some 560 lines of verse hand written by him is preserved to date. His best-known prose works in addition to The Discoverie of Guiana are A Report of the Truth of the Fight About the Iles of Açores This Last Sommer (1591; generally known as The Last Fight of the Revenge) and The History of the World (1614).

In the light of the unbelievable happenings, there is room to present Raleigh either as a hero or as a ‘traitor’. 

His original death sentence was especially gruesome: "... [you are] to be hanged and cut down alive, and your body shall be opened, your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off, and thrown into the fire before your eyes; then your head to be stricken off from your body, and your body shall be divided into four quarters, to be disposed of at the king's pleasure." 

Imagine the road travelled to achieve human rights for all.

**

Julia de Burgos 

In many Latin American and Spanish-speaking countries, it is traditional for a woman to take her husband’s last name with the added designation “de,” which literally translates as “of” but idiomatically means “belonging to.” This practice reinforces the patriarchal nature of many of these cultures. But, Julia Constancia Burgos García (Julia de Burgos) started  signing as  Julia de Burgos - “a defiant announcement” indicating  that “she will henceforth be of herself, and belongs to herself”. “I am life, strength, and woman” is one of her memorable phrases. 

She was an outspoken activist on civil rights issues relating to women, and is also an ardent advocate for the independence of Puerto Rico. Her poems mainly addressed issues relating to the social struggles faced by the oppressed, particularly women. 

The poem:  “To Julia de Burgos” is her most renowned poem. The reader could easily perceive the spirit of the revolution and resistance that emerges at the end of this poem. The poem  denounce oppression, incite revolution and even function as sites of rebellion and transformation. 

In real life, women are tied to men, families and tradition which handicaps  their understanding of her clean, pure womanhood. The poem is a movingly truthful auto critique that celebrates the inner strength of woman as embodied in her mind and her determination to keep that mind unattached, singular, and uninfluenced by the voice the public thinks she is.  

TO JULIA DE BURGOS

- Julia de Burgos

Already the people murmur that I am your enemy
because they say that in verse I give the world your me.

They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos.
Who rises in my verses is not your voice. It is my voice
because you are the dressing and the essence is me;
and the most profound abyss is spread between us.

You are the cold doll of social lies,
and me, the virile starburst of the human truth.

You, honey of courtesan hypocrisies; not me;
in all my poems I undress my heart.

You are like your world, selfish; not me
who gambles everything betting on what I am.

You are only the ponderous lady very lady;
not me; I am life, strength, woman.

You belong to your husband, your master; not me;
I belong to nobody, or all, because to all, to all
I give myself in my clean feeling and in my thought.

You curl your hair and paint yourself; not me;
the wind curls my hair, the sun paints me.

You are a housewife, resigned, submissive,
tied to the prejudices of men; not me;
unbridled, I am a runaway Rocinante
snorting horizons of God's justice.

You in yourself have no say; everyone governs you;
your husband, your parents, your family,
the priest, the dressmaker, the theatre, the dance hall,
the auto, the fine furnishings, the feast, champagne,
heaven and hell, and the social, "what will they say."

Not in me, in me only my heart governs,
only my thought; who governs in me is me.
You, flower of aristocracy; and me, flower of the people.
You in you have everything and you owe it to everyone,
while me, my nothing I owe to nobody.

You nailed to the static ancestral dividend,
and me, a one in the numerical social divider,
we are the duel to death who fatally approaches.

When the multitudes run rioting
leaving behind ashes of burned injustices,
and with the torch of the seven virtues,
the multitudes run after the seven sins,
against you and against everything unjust and inhuman,
I will be in their midst with the torch in my hand.

*

[ Julia Constancia Burgos García (Julia de Burgos), was born in Barrio Santa Cruz, Carolina, in extreme poverty, on 17 February 1914. She had 12 siblings after her. At the age of 19, she started as a teacher  after graduation from the university of Puerto Rico with a degree in teaching. Sooner, to devote more time for writing, she left her teaching job; became the elected Secretary General of the Daughters of Freedom, a non-partisan organization attached to the Nationalist Party. 

Her first marriage at 20  with Ruben Rodrigues Beauchamp failed within three years. Besides the failure of her first marriage, her two subsequent marriages also failed leading to the poet slipping into depression. At the time of her death she was 39 residing in New York. 

Ironically, as she had no identification on her when she collapsed, she was given a pauper’s burial on Hart Island. Later, a group of her friends and family claimed her body, and Julia was reburied, this time with the dignity and respect she deserved, in the Municipal Cemetery of Carolina, Puerto Rico, where a monument was built in her honor. 

Though she died much too young, she left an enduring literary heritage that continues to be much appreciated. Scholars have examined her poetry in terms of her early feminist perspective and quest for self-identity. She was seen as the pioneer of feminist writers and poets. She is considered by many as the greatest Puerto Rican poet and counted among the great poets of Latin America.

*

 To me,who has been  an unseen landlord (@ Chennai ) and a tenant (@ Tiruchy) simultaneously  during some time earlier, this poem is nearer to my experiences as a tenant.

 The Ballad of the Landlord

Landlord, landlord,
My roof has sprung a leak.
Don't you 'member I told you about it
Way last week?

Landlord, landlord,
These steps is broken down.
When you come up yourself
It's a wonder you don't fall down.

Ten Bucks you say I owe you?
Ten Bucks you say is due?
Well, that's Ten Bucks more'nI'l pay you
Till you fix this house up new.

What? You gonna get eviction orders?
You gonna cut off my heat?
You gonna take my furniture and
Throw it in the street?

Um-huh! You talking high and mighty.
Talk on-till you get through.
You ain'tgonna be able to say a word
If I land my fist on you.

Police! Police!
Come and get this man!
He's trying to ruin the government
And overturn the land!

Copper's whistle!
Patrol bell!
Arrest.
Precinct Station.
Iron cell.
Headlines in press:

MAN THREATENS LANDLORD
TENANT  HELD  NO BAIL

JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL!

- 

*Langston Hughes

 

No lengthy introduction is needed to Longston Hughes for modern readers. Yet, a brief one on the poet would do.

Born in 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934).When Langston was young, his father divorced his mother Carrie and even left the country. After the separation with her husband, his mother had to go to places seeking employment. His early life was thus unstable and his childhood was not a very happy one. He had to spend most of his childhood in Kansas with his maternal grandmother Mary Patterson Langston. It was his grandmother Mary Langston who instilled a lasting sense of racial pride in Langston Hughes.

Though Hughes is known as an Afro-American, his ancestral mix shows more. His paternal and maternal great-grandmothers were African-American; his maternal great-grandfather was white and of Scottish descent; his paternal great-grandfather was of European Jewish descent. His work permeated the pride in his African-American identity and its diverse culture. Hughes died at the age of 65 on May 22, 1967 from complications after abdominal surgery, related to prostate cancer.

Hughes was a many-sided personality - poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He is considered one among the chief bards of the Harlem Renaissance. He was also one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes chose to be unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He stressed the theme of "black is beautiful". His main concern was the uplift of his people, whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor.

His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working class blacks in America, lives full of struggles, joy, laughter, and music. He summed himself as "my seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind," He confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself; a “people’s poet” who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality.

THE BACKGROUND THEN:  During the times of Langston, in the U.S.A color discrimination was in its peak. (Has it subsided now?) The blacks suffered untold miseries. 

The tenant and landlord in the poem are symbols of the black and whites representing the perpetual human divide in the country. The police and the judges were mostly whites and were certainly not neutral. Even the Press failed to be impartial as they served as the mouthpieces of the Whites.

Here, in the poem, we witness the black (‘tenant’) being mercilessly exploited by the white (‘the landlords’). To make things worse, the police and the court also are also 'palm-touching pals' to the ‘landlord’. They congregate  to cause exploitation of the ‘black tenant’. Ironically, the hero in this ballad is not the landlord (though the title shows him), but it is the tenant, who raises voices for the injustice and turns a hero against oppression.

*

 

 The Wind Blew Your House Away

 

The wind blew away your house
And, you still worry about the wind blowing in my hair?!
The myth of which cave’s sleepers has you intoxicated so?
Why are you sleeping?
A hundred tribes go to ruins while you sleep
The scandal about the kingdom’s thieves is everywhere
But, with your two hands, you still hold on to the two ends of my shawl

You are asleep behind this worn out curtain, and I,
with this same ‘forbidden’ hair of mine
will weave a ladder as tall as the sunrise
to bring out the sun
And you are asleep and water passes over you

And you never saw
how in the forest, pine trees were cut down, night after night,

in place of poplar trees
And there were no tigers when
mythological Damavand Mountain
was hanged from the loin
And for every grain of rice that had come to our table through hard labor,
in the rice paddies,
they planted iron, bricks, and walls

And you are sleeping,

and water thirsted for Hamoon Lake,
blood of Zayandeh River clotted,
and the breath of Hoor Wetlands’ humid nights
were buried under mud

The wind blew away your house
The scandal about the lootings has broken out
With your claws, you grab on to my night’s hair
Lest the famine-stricken nights of our dinner spread
reveals the emptiness of your fists
Lest anyone sees your temper

I am veiled
but not veiled according to volition of my own free body
I am veiled because of your spoiled body and mind
You are asleep behind this worn out curtain, and I,
with this same ‘forbidden’ hair of mine
will weave a ladder as tall as the sunrise
to bring out the sun.

- Hila Sedighi (1985- ), Iran.

Knowing the poet and the background would facilitate a better understanding of the poem here.

The Poet Hila Sedighi,   was born in 1985 in Tehran. This brave, young, poet, painter and civil rights activist in Iran took an acive part in the 2009 presidential campaign of reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. But the conservative incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was ‘declared returned’ to office. Demonstrations against such a farce became known as the Green Movement .The members and supporters of this movement took to the streets claiming the election was fraudulent and demanding that the election be annulled.

 

Hila wrote powerful poems protesting against the severe repression that followed the disputed 2009 presidential election and emotionally recited them in public. Her public readings of poems drew her large audience and also the wrath of the government. Due to her active, direct involvements in protest activities of the Green Movement, she was forced to resign from her job with the Tehran Municipality in the summer of 2010. On December 9, 2010, the agents of the Intelligence Ministry searched her home and took away a number of her personal belongings including her computer, notes, books etc. By way of harassing her, the Intelligence ministry summoned and interrogated Sedighi countless times, including during nights. In August of 2011, the Revolutionary Court handed over to her a 4 month prison sentence. This was suspended later for five years. A travel ban was also imposed on her and that was concurrently lifted. 

In the meantime in 2012, Sedighi was awarded the Hellman-Hammett Grant (prize) for free expression for protection of human rights. The authorities arrested Hila Sedighi  on Jan 7, 2016, at Imam Khomeini International Airport when she and her husband were returning from a trip to the United Arab Emirates.  Sedighi’s arrest in 2016 was said to be in connection with a sentence issued against her in absentia by the Culture and Media Court (a special court to try media and culture-related crimes). No reason was given by the government or judicial officials for her arrest or where she is being detained. International voices rose against her arbitrary arrest and she was released on bail after a couple of days.

 

Perhaps the January 2016 arrest of Hila Sedighi was due to her posting, in her blog, a video of her reading the poem critical of the ‘veil’(compulsory head coverings that women must wear in the Islamic Republic of Iran). In the video, that went viral, she was shown sitting alongside a photo of her without the ‘prescribed veil. In the verse, she was forcefully harsh on the government for showing undue interest in issues such as a woman’s ‘veil” while corruption and other maladies grow uncontrollably in the country.

Hila’s has studied law and she continues to live in and write from Tehran. Her poems are mostly related to the trials and tribulations of Iranians and particularly women. In public recitals, she performs her poems with passion and genuine pain and draws the audience to her. She mostly writes in Persian and her poems are translated in several languages. Ms. Sedighi bases her art on current, gross and continued human rights violations in Iran, boundless injustices based on the regime’s medieval regression, and defense against unwanted Arabization.

The Background: The extremist fundamentalism practiced by the .Iranian government owing allegiance to the ideals of its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini and its Judiciary was one that will brook no dissent at any level. The authorities too worked overtime to instill a sense of mortal fear in the minds of the dissenters, their families and general public. Measures were unleashed to intimidate and silence any voice of protest through arbitrary arrests and dreaded imprisonments. Any artistic expression was under unprecedented assault in that period as evidenced by a steady surge in the crackdown on members of the artistic community.  

In October 2015, a Revolutionary Court sentenced poet Fatemeh Ekhtesari to 9 years and 6 months in prison and another poet, Mehdi Mousavi, was sentenced to 11 years in prison. In addition, both were sentenced to 99 lashes. The documentary filmmaker Keywan Karimi was sentenced to 6 years in prison and 233 lashes for “insulting the sacred” and for showing “illegitimate relations” ( for just Shaking hands with persons of the opposite sex).Further, three music producers, Mehdi Rajabian, Hossein Rajabian and Yousef Emadi, were sentenced to 6 years in prison alleging that their productions were  “propaganda against the state”. The poet and lyricist Yaghma Golrouee was arrested at his home on November 30, 2015, and later released on bail. Poet Mohamadreza Haj Rostambegloo was arrested on December 16, 2015, and bailed out two days later.

Not only poets and artists, the crackdown, has also targeted journalists and individuals associated with reformist groups in Iran. These arrests and intimidations have intensified as the country approached the critical Parliamentary elections in February 2016. The mounting arrests of young artists (‘national treasures’) in Iran was yet another indication of the suffocating domination of Government’s security and intelligence agencies over the Iranian Judiciary.

Now , in the light of these the reader ca go to the poem again.

 *

IS OUR FREEDOM GETTING ERODED FAST?

 FREEDOM HOUSE REPORT.2020  

The regular country reports by Freedom House  (a non-profit based in USA) assess the level of political rights and civil liberties in the nations surveyed. 25 indicators are used within seven categories given below: 

-electoral processes, 

-political processes and pluralism, 

-functioning of government, 

-freedom of expression and belief, 

-association and organisational  rights, 

-rule of law, 

-personal autonomy and individual rights. . 

The 2020 report,  has ranked  India at  83rd position along with Timor-Leste and Senegal, among the  195 nations surveyed,  This is near the bottom among the category of  "Free countries." 

The report shows a decline  in freedom in India from last year's position. By sliding down 4 points- from 75 to 71- India has become one of the world’s least free democracies,  among the world’s 25 largest democracies.

The Score for Political Rights is 34/40 and  37/60 for civil liberties. (Total 71/100).The report  has warned about “the Indian government’s alarming departures from democratic norms" under the present regime.

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Corruption: A Very Severe Handicap for Human Rights by Prof. Raja Mutthirulandi 

Testing 6

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Testing 5

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